In fact, we’ve known that for years. Whenever a francophone says to me something along the lines of, “Oh you English-Canadians” (and it’s almost never a compliment, by the way), I have to respectfully underline that I have nothing in common with people in Calgary or Toronto. And it’s not just because we buy our beer and smokes at the dépanneur as opposed to the corner store.

The real reason we’re different is because we live in a French country. Oops, I mean province. But let’s face it. It is like another country. When I go to Toronto, a city I actually kind of like, I feel like I’m a tourist in a place that’s so different from home.

So we’re different because we live in a French-language place. By definition, we’re submerged in a different culture. There’s the rub, though. We’re not really submerged in that culture.

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Montreal-based executive Mitch Garber got tongues wagging on both sides of the linguistic divide a couple of weeks back when he said that us anglos should make more of an effort to sample the local franco culture around us. He might have mentioned Martin Matte and how you should know the popular comic, and would it be outrageously egotistical of me to mention that I think Garber nabbed that one directly from a pieceI wrote earlier this year about how anglos don’t know Matte? It is outrageously egotistical? Okay, I withdraw that comment then.

In any case, his remarks were, of course, applauded by francophones and blasted by anglophones. Garber doesn’t need me to come to his defense but the fact is that it is a little bizarre that my community hasn’t the slightest idea about what’s going on in the culture around them.

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Yeah I know, you can’t legislate to force people to watch Tout le monde en parle. You have to want to watch it. But why don’t you want to watch it? That’s what I don’t get.

Why would you not want to participate in the culture you live in? Aren’t you a little curious about what your francophone co-workers do after they get off work? Look, the reality is that most English-Canadians don’t even really consume their own culture but that doesn’t make it right.

The weird thing about the world of English Montreal is that if we’re not sampling local franco culture, then we’re not sampling any local culture at all. You watch a lot of Montreal-made English TV shows? English Montreal films? Of course you don’t, because they don’t exist (with very few exceptions).

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Music is a little different given that our city has such a thriving local English-language indie scene. So many of us do indeed listen to local English-language rock music.

And that brings us back to the point that we are our own little distinct society. And the alt-rock milieu is the perfect example of that. We’re different as a result of living in this bigger distinct society.

I have always believed that Montreal produced this incredibly rich music scene in part because these mostly anglo musicians were toiling in the margins of the franco music industry ici. The bands are holed up in Mile End just a few miles away from the big halls where Marie-Mai, Pierre Lapointe and Louis-Jean Cormier are headlining, but they might as well be in a different country.

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That marginality helped the indie artists by making them more unique. If they were in an English city like Toronto, I’m convinced they would’ve ended up being more influenced by the mainstream bores in the music biz. But here they get to do their own thing.

So maybe that’s the perfect example of the strange paradox of English-Montreal culture. We live in this franco universe but we’re not really ever fully part of it.

In the case of the music, the result is some great art. That’s the upside. The downside is you’re sitting in a café on St. Viateur St. and you’re wondering if these anglo hipsters even know they’re living in a mostly-franco province.

I think back to that really cool 2012 documentary From Montréal, a look at the Montreal alt music world directed by Yannick B. Gélinas, that focused on the divide between anglo and franco musicians. It showed Patrick Watson jamming in a Plateau park with Cormier but mostly it’s about how there’s still such a distance between the two communities.